LOLing With Longreads 5/30/14

Once again, I’m here for some reason. Specifically, Emily Perper has been more than busy with In The Next Room Or The Vibrator Play at the Maryland Ensemble Theatre, which I highly recommend you see if you support the female orgasm, a stand point I presume our readers are savvy enough to get behind. So in wake of week filled with bad news, I give you two longreads from funny people on a devastatingly serious topic.

We can logically place the blame on these mass shootings on a number of things, gun laws, mental health, misogyny, but at the end of the day it comes down to the individual. In this piece, Chris Gethard opens about his past, entertaining the idea of shootings, feeling rejected, alone, much like Eliot Rodgers. But Chris offers a solution, a solution outside of gun restrictions or mental health evaluations. This piece is about looking inside yourself and finding a better you. Realizing that while you may feel alone and rejected, there’s a community out there for everyone and if you start think less and less about your selfish ideals about who “owes” you what, you’ll begin to find that things aren’t nearly as bad.

I didn’t chime in on #YesAllWomen. Not to say I didn’t support it 100%. BUT as a man, I didn’t feel it was my place to chime in (Okay, I chimed in this morning after Emily informed me that the woman who started the tag was getting death/rape threats and every degree of not cool) on what women are going through because frankly, I don’t know. A lot of us don’t know, that’s why this thing is so important. That’s why we should be reading about it, to become informed. Jackie writes a great piece about the importance of what’s being said and why we should take the time to listen rather than jump to our own defenses simply because not all men are rapists.

Well, I hope I did an adequate job summing up these pieces. Em will be back next week, and I’ll return on Monday with an explanation as to why posts were so scarce this week.